58 tling conclusions in the study's draft report was that core meltdowns would be much less severe than had previ- ously been believed. The reasoning that had been used to support this novel conclusion-that the soil could act as an effective filter for radioactive gases-did not impress the members of the review group, who called the ap- pendix dealing with these phenomena "very weak." At the time the review was done, important parts of the draft had not been completed. The appendix on de- sign adequacy was the least complete section. Of thirty-one design questions relating to the Surry plant, work had been completed on only ten, according to De Young's count. With so much more work still to be done, "the issu- ance of the Reactor Safety Study re- port, in essentially its present or even in an editorially revised state, as any- thing other than an interim status re- port would be inadvisable and a disser- vice to the study group," DeYoung wrote. "The report contains deficien- cies and inconsistencies to such an ex- tent that to correct them will likely be a major task requiring many more months of effort." T HE A.E.C. had no intention of postponing the publication of the already much delayed Reactor Safety Study. In spite of its technic(:J.l flaws, it was released, in fourteen volumes, on August 20, 1974. The A.E.C.'s plan was that the reassuring results of the study would be publicized in the big- gest media effort the agency had ever organized, just as senior officials had intended when Chairman Schlesinger commissioned the work, in 1972. (Schlesinger himself had left the A.E.C. in 1973 to become the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. His successor, Dixy Lee Ray, a marine biologist specializing in sea worms, had served as the head of a science- and-technology museum in Seattle, where she had been the host of a local television program; her credentials as a public-relations expert were reported to have been a factor in her appoint- ment by President Nixon.) A.E.C. of- ficials accordingly announced, with unqualified enthusiasm, that the study proved that nuclear power was far safer than just about everything else in modern life. Their most widely quoted condensation of the study's findings- it was the lead sentence in most major news reports on the study-was that "a person has about as much chance of dying from an atomic reactor accident as of being struck by a meteor." The report was labelled a draft, but the Commission lent the full weight of its authority to the conclusions. There was no hint of any tentativeness about the basic data or about the methods used in the study. The A.E.C. made no mention of the internal review group, and its two hundred pages of comments on the study were not made public. Levine's staff had not had time to respond to the numerous objections that this group of experts had raised, or to make a11 the necessary correc- tions. As the A.E.C. launched its gi- gantic publicity campaign to broadcast the study's results around the country, it strongly emphasized the "indepen- dence" of the study; many news re- ports referred to it as "the M.I.T. study." The A.E.C. public-relations staff recorded a two-and-a-half-min- ute television message summarizing the study for distribution to stations around the country. The film clip fea- tured Norman Rasmussen sitting out- side the Student Center at M.l.T. and being interviewed by an A.E.C. offi- cial; it left the strong impression that the Commission was just learning the results of a study that had been done at M.l.T. As it had hoped, the A.E.C. immediately received favorable public- ity worldwide when news stories used the study's findings to declare the reac- tor-safety controversy finally settled. "CAMPAIGNERS ..c\GAINST NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS PUT TO ROUT," the headline in the British newspaper The Guardian read. It was a fair summary of the A.E.C.'s public-relations coup. The laudatory response of the press to the Rasmussen Report contrasted strongly with the study's reception by the scientific community. An editorial in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists commented in October, 1974: Whether the conclusions can withstand the close scrutiny they are bound to re- ceive within the next few months remains to be seen. . . . The report is essentially an in-house study by an agency under. heavy pressure to get critics off its back. It is in no sense an independent evaluation of the A.E.C.'s performance or policies in nuclear reactor safety; it is, instead, a defense of them. iii.. .. .. - :-- . . - , ì' - The A.E.C.'s stated purpose in re- leasing the draft report was to permit public comment before it was put into final form-an action that the A.E.C. planned to take as quickly as possible. Following the release of the draft, the A.E.C. regulatory staff organized a second in-house review group, to pro- vide further comments on the study. Directed by Hanauer, this review group carried out a general reading of the draft and a selective examination of key issues. It, too, had to wor k hurriedly, however, because the A.E.C. had allowed only sixty days for comment. The second review group identified some of the same flaws in the study as the first had (the "shal- low" analysis of accidents caused by earthquakes, it repeated, may be "a basic error" in the study), and it also emphasized several additional con- cerns. The panel noted, for example, that major fires in nuclear plants could have "severe and widespread" effects, and yet the Rasmussen group had ne- glected this obvious risk. Another problem that the study had neglected, the review panel observed, was "the possibility of accident conditions in the plant leading to panic in the crew with subsequent abandonment." In addition to numerous comments on specific issues like these, the second internal review panel raised several far-reaching questions about the basic methods used in the study. The Ras- mussen group, it noted, had carried out a fault-tree analysis of just two plants and then extrapolated the results and drawn general conclusions about the risks associated with the operation of a hundred plants-the number that the A.E.C. projected would be in opera- tion in the early nineteen-eighties. This might not be valid, they said, because these two plants-Surry Unit 1 and Peach Bottom Unit 2-were "atypical in a significant number of instances." Moreover, even if they had been representative of the average plant, there would still be the possibil- ity that the ninety-eight other p ants might include a very substandard one, at which the risk of major accidents would be very much higher. In a telephone conversation on De- cember 5, 1974, Rasmussen and Hanauer discussed the review group's comments. Hanauer's handwritten record of this conversation noted that he had told Rasmussen that there were "things" Rasmussen had to "try and improve" in the final report but that many regulatory-staff suggestions were "beyond capability for final re-